P&G sets up real-time "war room"

4 July 2013

CINCINNATI: Procter & Gamble (P&G) has developed a "war room" approach to real-time marketing during major events such as the Olympic Games and the Oscars, two leading executives have said.

Kevin Crociata and Rotha Penn, marketing director and communications manager respectively for the Pantene hair care brand in the US, told eMarketer how they had prepared for this year's Academy Awards ceremony.

Crociata outlined the development of the brand's #WantThatHair Twitter program which originated as a way to enter the conversation about the celebrities arriving for the event.

"If you watched the red-carpet show, it's the hair and the dress that everybody talks about," he observed and #WantThatHair was the angle that got the brand into the discussion.

"If there's a look on the red carpet and you want that hair, we have a way to get you that hair with our Pantene products," said Crociata.

Penn added: "For a lot of our brands, when there are these big, real moments in time, we enable a war room with an agile marketing team to sit and monitor the situation and the conversations that are going on and then respond to consumers with relevant content."

The need for agility became apparent when conversations veered towards men with long hair attending the event. "But because we were all together in a room, we were able to leverage that conversation and enter into that conversation in a relevant way with our products," said Penn.

The #WantThatHair Twitter program delivered an estimated 41.9m impressions in three days, achieving a Promoted Tweet engagement rate of 4.7%, well above Twitter's CPG benchmark of 1.5%.

In addition, Pantene, a non-sponsor, claimed a 120% uplift compared to a sponsor brand's 74% lift.

For the future, Crociata said the brand was being careful to pick "moments where we can be relevant and engaging with the content we're creating because there's not going to be 20 of them a year".

"There's an opportunity to do a few big, impactful ones, making sure we're relevant at the time, but [we also need to] have content that's ongoing," he added.